DistroWatch Weekly

A weekly opinion column and a summary of events from the distribution world

DistroWatch Weekly

DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 378, 1 November 2010

Welcome to this year's 44th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! During the past week Fedora developers have completed their fourteenth stable release and have given the green light for its ceremonious launch on 2nd of November. We cover the decision process, which was later followed by Jesse Keating's stepping down as the release engineering lead - read more about these events in the news section below. Other topics covered in today's issue of DistroWatch Weekly include a first look at the newbie-friendly Pinguy OS 10.04, Ubuntu's decision to switch its default user interface to Unity, Debian's announcement about the first beta build of the Debian installer for "Squeeze", information about some of the more interesting changes in the upcoming version of Pardus Linux, and an explanation about the command line and why it is such an integral part of Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Finally, we are happy to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com October 2010 donation is the Geany text editor and IDE for programmers. Happy reading!

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Feature Story (by Jesse Smith)

Introducing Pinguy OS 10.04 LTS

Pinguy OS is a project which attempts to take the Ubuntu distribution and make it more attractive and easier to use. The distribution targets home users who are not yet familiar with Linux and tries to provide everything an inexperienced (Linux) computer user will need right out of the box. In the words of the project's creator: "What I am trying to do is to have an operating system that works and acts like a pre-configured OS - like the ones you get when buying a new computer." To learn more about the story behind Pinguy OS, I chatted with Antoni Norman, the developer behind this new distribution.

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DW: What plans do you have for future versions of Pinguy OS? Are you planning new features?

AN: At the moment we have a beta version of a post install application for Pinguy OS. This will make it so people will be able to configure Pinguy OS to the way they want it easily.

DW: Will you been matching your releases with Ubuntu's schedule? That is, one release every six months, or will you be releasing on an independent schedule?

AN: We will, but it will be a few months after Canonical releases Ubuntu. As there are always a few bugs that are found that I like to fix before releasing Pinguy OS. Plus some of the tweaks and enhancements I make need to be redone to work with the new versions.

DW: From your project's website it sounds like you have the same goals as Linux Mint and some other Ubuntu-based systems. What makes Pinguy stand out from the crowd?

DW: Pinguy uses an OS X theme on the desktop. Are you targeting Mac users? Or do you feel OS X provides your ideal desktop experience?

AN: Pinguy OS uses the best elements from all desktop environments. I wanted to have a desktop that was very clean-looking and modern, that was also very intuitive. I believe that using dockbars, the Mint menu and the Elementary theme archives these goals.

DW: Quite a few of the APT sources are Personal Package Archives (PPA). What made you decide to pull software from PPAs instead of the LTS repositories?

AN: Some of the applications that are included in Pinguy OS are not in the Ubuntu repositories so I had to add PPAs. I was thinking about having my own repository, but after a while I decided not to, as all I would be doing is pulling the DEBs from the project's PPA and hosting them on my server. The PPAs that are being used are from the project's team PPA. So this is the best way to have up-to-date stable applications.

DW: There's a lot of work that goes into making a distribution. Do you have help? Is the project open to volunteers who would like to assist?

AN: At the moment it's just me that works on Pinguy OS full time, but I do have volunteers who help with bug reporting and running the forum. The project is open to anyone who wants to help. The best way for others to help is to post in the forum ways you can help the project.

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The Pinguy OS comes in 32-bit and 64-bit flavours and is based off Ubuntu's 10.04 long-term support release. The download image weighs in at a solid 1.3 GB and I grabbed the 32-bit edition for my experiment. While I was waiting for my download to complete, I took a look around Pinguy's website. The project is young, having been founded earlier this year and so the website is still a bit thin. Oh, it's well laid out and I like the style of the page, but there isn't a lot of documentation yet. The site mostly provides links to other locations and a description of the project's goals. The links take us to the project's Facebook page, to their online store, to a donation page, a sponsorship page, to a place where we can purchase the DVD (for those who don't want to download and burn their own copy) and to a forum. The forum is a bit light in traffic at the moment, but that's to be expected with a newer distro. The important thing is there are people visiting the forum and answering questions. The focus of the website leans more toward the financial side of things than most open source projects. That in itself is fine, there is nothing wrong with encouraging people to donate to a free operating system, but hopefully we'll see more documentation as the project matures.

At any rate, the download finished, I burned the DVD and started my new adventure. The DVD's boot menu is essentially Ubuntu's and carries the same options of booting into the live desktop environment, starting the graphical installer or launching a text installer. I chose to explore the live mode and the system quickly brought me to a GNOME desktop with a strong OS X theme. At the top of the screen we find the application menu, a short menu bar, the system tray and system monitors. Down the left side are short-cuts to folders and down the right-hand side is a large status panel with information on CPU, memory, networking and disk usage. Along the bottom of the screen is a quick-launch bar equipped with popular open source software. The background is a pleasant and fairly subtle image featuring rich blues. Once I confirmed that the system was running smoothly, I kicked off the graphical installer.

Pinguy's installer is, for our purposes, the Ubuntu installer. It walked me through selecting a preferred language, time zone and keyboard layout. The user is then asked to set up partitions, which I found to be a straightforward process. The installer asks for a user account to be created and a password to be set and then goes on to work copying the required files to the local hard drive. The whole process is fairly quick and painless. Upon rebooting, Pinguy OS presented me with a graphical login screen.

Though Pinguy OS is a direct descendant of Ubuntu, it's more than just a different theme and some additional software packages. The project also borrows from other distributions, the most obvious being Mint. For example, the application menu is taken from Mint, as is the update software tool. One of the first things I noticed when I logged in to my fresh install was the update notification icon which showed my system as being completely up to date. I clicked on the icon and asked it to refresh to double-check and, a few seconds later, was assured my system was completely patched. Manually opening a terminal, running "sudo apt-get update" and then asking the update utility to refresh again presented me with a list of over one hundred available updates. From that point on, I had no issues with package management. Pinguy uses Synaptic, resting on top of APT, and the process of obtaining and removing packages went smoothly. Pinguy also comes equipped with the Ubuntu Software Centre, a package manager which trades out complexity for clear categories and icons, making obtaining software more novice-friendly.

Though come to think of it, most novice computer users aren't likely to need additional software. The list of applications which come pre-installed with Pinguy is impressive. In the menu we find Firefox 3.6.10 with a large collection of add-ons, such as Adblock and Download Helper. We have OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, a BitTorrent client, a music player, VLC, MPlayer, disc burners and a DVD ripper. Additionally we have DeVeDe for creating our own video DVDs, Dropbox, a backup tool, a few instant messenger clients, a micro-blogging client, a phone manager and an iPod manager. Rounding out the selection are Skype, Java, GParted and the Ubuntu One service. Since Pinguy uses GNOME for the default interface, there is a group of applications for adjusting the appearance and behaviour of the desktop. I found that Pinguy OS comes with software to play most multimedia files, including videos and MP3s. Flash is also pre-installed and works with Firefox. I was surprised to find that the system comes with VirtualBox too, considering the project's concentration on new-comers.

The Ubuntu family of distributions handles my hardware very well and Pinguy is no exception. All of my HP laptop's hardware (2 GHz dual-core CPU, 3 GB of RAM, Intel video card) was detected and properly configured. My wireless card connected without any problems, screen resolution was set to a reasonable level and my audio worked out of the box. The touchpad properly handled scrolling and taps as mouse clicks. On my desktop machine (2.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM, NVIDIA video card) Pinguy also performed smoothly. Though start-up times were noticeably longer on the desktop, video, sound and networking performed well. I found desktop effects, and therefore some of the more distracting interface features, were disabled on the desktop machine. I suspect this is from using an open source driver with my NVIDIA card, rather than the company's closed-source offering. During tests in a virtual environment, Pinguy would boot and run with 512 MB of RAM, though performance was a little sluggish. When running with 1 GB of RAM or more, I found performance to be very good.

Security was a mixed bag on Pinguy. The only network service running by default was Samba. Personally, I'd rather it wasn't, but it will be helpful for people on heterogeneous networks. Also by default, there is no firewall configured. There is a graphical firewall program included in the application menu for people who want to put the protection in place. As I mentioned before, the update notification didn't work for me when I first booted the system, but once I did a manual refresh I had a steady stream of updated packages. Pinguy OS pulls software from a long list of sources, including the Ubuntu mirrors and a handful of PPAs. I'm a bit divided on this arrangement as I think using a PPA can be a helpful way to keep up to date, but following several strikes me as a security concern. Anyone can create a PPA and offer up custom packages and using these chips away at the implied security of having a vetted repository, such as Ubuntu provides.

Judging a graphical user interface is a subjective thing and I hesitate to come down on Pinguy for their choice. However, I do have three complaints in this regard. As I see it, when a project wants to make their interface friendly to newcomers there are two ways of accomplishing that goal. The first is to make a clean and simple interface and attempt to make it as intuitive as possible -- an alien, but easy-to-learn environment. A second approach is to rip off another interface the users will recognize. Zenwalk takes the former option, AUSTRUMI offers both options and Pinguy OS is firmly planted in the latter. The interface follows in OS X's footsteps and whether you enjoy the experience will depend on how you view OS X's interface. Personally, I don't think this is the way to go. It's one thing to make new users feel at home, but I think Pinguy takes things too far in trying to be like OS X, adopting some of that product's more unhelpful features.

My other complaint is that the default interface is quite busy. There are status monitors at the top of the screen, there's a large status panel down the right side and there's a flashy launchbar at the bottom. These items are regularly updating and I found it distracting. It didn't help that clicking on the right-side status panel wouldn't let me move nor remove it. Eventually I killed the offending process to remove the distraction. My final gripe is with the application menu. Whether the user likes the Mint-style menu or not aside, I found the menu items inconsistent. Some programs are listed in the menu using their name and others their description. It's fairly easy for a new user to figure out what "Phone Manager" does or what "Remove orphaned packages" will do, but someone who is new to Linux might be lost when presented with applications labelled "Pinta", "Gnome Do" and "Ubuntu Tweak".

In the end, I think Pinguy OS has a good concept, but at this stage it needs some polish in the implementation. The idea of taking Ubuntu and adding popular software and giving the system a familiar interface is a good one (it has served the Mint community well). However, the approach feels unfocused. Including popular codecs and software for a wide range of activities is a good plan, but in Pinguy's case it makes the menu feel cluttered. Sometimes unnecessarily. For instance, why do I have five image viewers/editors, but no GIMP? If the distro is targeting newcomers then why include VirtualBox? For that matter, I find it odd that the system includes three graphical package managers. Likewise, there are two CPU usage monitors on the desktop, two network monitors and two clocks. All four sides of the desktop covered with panels which will cover up windows when they are moved into the same space. It feels crowded visually and takes up a noticeable amount of resources. I feel Pinguy OS would benefit from looking at Zenwalk and following the clean and integrated one-app-per-task approach and avoid making users choose between three different video players.

Granted, this is early in the project's development and it's not reasonable to expect perfection the first time. And to Mr Norman's credit, this initial release does achieve its goal of giving the user almost all of the software they need straight out of the box without requiring additional configuration. I'm hoping we see a new version of Pinguy down the line which combines the large selection of pre-installed software with a less busy interface.

Yes, it's the long-awaited Fedora release week. As Adam Williamson reports on his blog, version 14 of the popular, Red Hat-sponsored distribution will be officially released as scheduled - on Tuesday, 2 November: "So we just got done signing off on the gold images for Fedora 14. I'm amazingly proud of the whole little release management group -- development (especially Anaconda team, who were awesome), release engineering, and QA teams: we had an unbelievably smooth ride through the final validation testing stage. Unprecedented in the annals of Fedora history, we span one publicly-announced test compose (TC) build (there were five unannounced ones, but they were just to test small fixes which we needed an image compose to verify) and exactly one release candidate (RC) build, which was the build signed off as Gold today. We have never needed just one candidate build to get a release right before." The Fedora mirrors are being populated as we write this so get your download tools ready - the official announcement should go live tomorrow (Tuesday) at 15:00 GMT.

In a related news, Jesse Keating, the leader of the Fedora release engineering team, has announced that he will step down from the duty after the release of Fedora 14: "Starting after the release of Fedora 14, I will be stepping down as the lead release engineer for Fedora. I will be taking the knowledge and lessons learned from our migration of CVS to git and applying it internally at Red Hat to migrate our internal package source control to git as well. The number of packages and contributors is smaller, but the environment is far more complex, and I am very much looking forward to the challenge. We have estimated that it could take up to a year or longer to complete the task. During that time, Dennis Gilmore will be stepping in to lead the Fedora release engineering team. Dennis has been involved with Fedora for just about as long as I have, if not longer and will be able to fill the role perhaps even better than I could. I won't be far away from the project, and I will continue to support and improve things such as fedpkg development and necessary changes for our compose tools such as pungi. I'm always just an email or IRC ping (with data) away."

* * * * *

Ubuntu is no stranger to making radical decisions regarding desktop user interfaces and this tendency was witnessed once again last week. As announced during the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, USA, the next release of Ubuntu will default to Unity desktop (first used in the Netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10) instead of the new GNOME 3.0 Shell. Jono Bacon reports: "Mark Shuttleworth just announced at the Ubuntu Developer Summit that we will be shipping the Unity environment in the Ubuntu desktop edition. Unity is the environment we shipped on the Ubuntu Netbook edition for the first time in Ubuntu 10.10, and users and OEMs have been enjoying the experience. It is an environment that is inspired by great design, touch, and a strong and integrated experience." However, not everybody is excited by the change. Michael Larabel of Phoronix observes the discontent over the decision on his website's forums: "There isn't anyone that's actually happy to see Unity coming to the Ubuntu desktop rather than the GNOME 3.0 Shell. Many users have already tried the current Unity desktop used by Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition and there are just lots of complaints." Still, there are those who are pleased with the change: "All in all, I think this is great news for the future of Linux and all the involved parties. As the default desktop environment changes, we will see the adoption rate but I expect it to be quite large in the Ubuntu community."

* * * * *

Those following the Debian development process were greeted last week with the availability of the first beta release of the Debian installer for "Squeeze", Debian's upcoming new stable release. This has been the standard procedure with all recent Debian versions, signalling that the release process is nearing its "sprint" stage. From Otavio Salvador's post on the debian-devel-announce mailing list: "The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the first beta release of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux 'Squeeze'. Improvements in this release of the installer: auto-selection of kernel for PlayStation 3; recovery partitions for Microsoft Windows are properly detected; Linux kernel updated to 2.6.32; GNU Parted updated to 2.2; support for new platforms has been added - Marvell GuruPlug, Marvell OpenRD-Ultimate, HP t5325 Thin Client (partial support); hardware-specific Debian packages are installed automatically using discover-pkginstall from the discover package; localization - added Kannada, Persian and Telugu languages (Asturian and Kazakh were added in alpha 1, and Estonian was reactivated in alpha 1)...." A word of caution for those who expect a swift arrival of Debian "Squeeze" - during the Debian "Lenny" release process it took the project nearly 11 months to arrive from beta 1 of the Debian installer to the final version of Debian "Lenny"...

* * * * *

Another project busy preparing for a new release is Pardus Linux, an independent distribution that has received excellent reviews for its last two stable releases. The upcoming version will be 2011, and while there is no official release schedule yet, it's clear that the developers are working on many interesting additions and a much improved package manager. Gökmen Göksel reports on his blog: "I was busy with Pardus 2011 for a while (we released Pardus 2011 Beta last week), where I couldn’t find a chance to write about development process. You will see great improvements in the upcoming release; Pardus 2011 will be shipped with KDE 4.5.2 and a whole bunch of our management tools which are written in Python, PyQt and PyKDE. I guess the package-manager will be the most noteworthy one in all. ... The most significant change is the new interface where you may see that there are tabs similar to Rekonq and Chromium. Package manager doesn’t have anything to offer in file menu but settings, so this menu-less aspect works better for our needs and it saves space, which is getting more and more important for netbooks and other small-screen devices." The above link includes a number of screenshots to illustrate the concepts.

Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Linux and the command line

It's-a-gooey-world asks: Why does Linux rely so much on the command line? Every time I see solutions posted on forums they use the command line. It makes Linux look outdated and scary.

DistroWatch answers: It's true that a lot of people (myself included) use the command line to run tests and perform fixes. And I suppose it can look scary to someone who is new to the scene. Some UNIX commands are pretty cryptic. That being said, I don't think it's fair to single out Linux for this characteristic. Generally I don't like to compare Linux to other operating systems, preferring to let it stand on its own qualities, but in this case I think it's important to point out that other popular operating systems use the command line too for trouble-shooting and administration. Most users can get by doing day-to-day tasks using the graphical interface, but when something goes wrong it's often helpful to use the command line. Some system administrative tasks, such as scheduling jobs or creating login scripts, require command-line knowledge on any operating system.

My point is that when things are working well and a person is performing common actions (web browsing, listening to music, checking e-mail) they can exclusively use graphical tools, whether they're using Linux or another operating system. I have friends who use Linux and don't touch the command line. But when problems arise, the command line is often a good way to get things done. It's when those problems spring up that people turn to support forums for help and we see command-line suggestions.

It's probably true to say that Linux gurus will turn to the command line more often than support people on other operating systems and I think there are two reasons for that. The first is that GNU/Linux distributions have a great collection of powerful command-line tools. It's possible to gather a large amount of data with a few commands and, often, fix things with a few more key strokes. The other reason is fragmentation. There are hundreds of Linux distributions and a lot of variation as to what is installed and where items are placed. Diversity is a wonderful thing, but it can be a nightmare for a support person.

Let's take, as an example, a simple task: removing a user account from the system. Were I to tell a person how to do this via their graphical interface, I'd have to know what desktop environment they're using, in some cases which version was installed, and whether the correct user management tool was available. Or I could walk the user through opening a command line and typing:

su userdel username

The latter is usually easier, especially in a text medium such as a web forum. Lots of commands the user can simply copy and paste into their terminal. What it all boils down to is that providing command-line instructions on a forum is usually faster and easier than asking a bunch of additional questions and posting answers with screenshots. It's not that things must be done that way, but it is convenient.

Ryan Finnie has announced the release of Finnix 100, a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian's testing branch: "Finnix 100 comes over a year since its previous release, Finnix 93.0, and introduces a new version scheme, with future versions incrementing numerically. Finnix 100 includes updated upstream Debian software and Linux kernel 2.6.32. The finnix-thumbdrive utility has been removed in favor of UNetbootin, which can take a Finnix ISO and extract it to a bootable USB drive without needing to boot Finnix first. PowerPC support has been officially dropped, though future PowerPC releases may be made on a one-off basis. The last PowerPC release, Finnix 93.0, will continue to be distributed through finnix.org and should continue to be useful for some time." Read the release announcement and release notes for further details.

Valtteri Halla has announced the release of MeeGo 1.1, a Linux distribution designed for mobile computing with a custom user interface: "Today we are announcing the project release of MeeGo 1.1. It provides a solid baseline for device vendors and developers to start creating software for various device categories on Intel Atom and ARM 7 architectures. The 1.1 Core OS provides a complete set of enabling technologies for mobile computing. The MeeGo stack contains Linux Kernel 2.6.35, X.org server 1.9.0, Web Runtime, Qt 4.7, and Qt Mobility 1.0.2, supporting the contacts, location, messaging, multimedia, and sensor and service frameworks. It also includes a number of leading-edge components, such as the oFono telephony stack, the ConnMan connection manager, the Tracker data indexer...." Read the release announcement and release notes for additional information.

Matthew Dillon has announced the availability of DragonFly BSD 2.8. The release has a version number of 2.8.2 after an earlier set of ISO images numbered 2.8.1 and 2.8.1A were withdrawn due to a critical bug. The new DragonFly BSD comes as a small installation CD image or as a bootable USB image with a graphical desktop (FVWM). From the announcement: "The DragonFly 2.8 release is here! Big-ticket items: a cryptsetup compatible cryptographic device mapper target was written for DragonFly; Packet Filter (pf) was updated to a version based upon OpenBSD 4.2; FreeBSD's WiFi (802.11) network stack has been ported; the multiprocessor work that has been ongoing in DragonFly is beginning to bear fruit - the MPLOCK has been pushed back significantly." Read the detailed release notes for more information and upgrade instructions.

George Vlahavas has announced the release of Salix OS 13.1.2 "KDE" edition, a Slackware-based installation and live CD optimised for desktop use: "The Salix team is proud to announce the very first official release of Salix KDE edition. A collection of three KDE CD images are immediately available to our users, including 32-bit and 64-bit installation images as well as a live image that can be burned to a CD or used with a USB drive. Salix KDE includes the elegant KDE 4.4.3 accompanied by a very rich collection of KDE-centric software, all in the size of a CD image. The Konqueror web browser, KMail and KTorrent are the main networking applications included in this release, followed by Akregator, an RSS reader for KDE, Kopete, the KDE instant messenger and more. Wicd is used for setting up your wired or wireless networking connections." The release announcement has more details.

We are happy to announce that the recipient of the October 2010 DistroWatch.com donation is Geany, a multi-platform text editor for programmers. It receives €210.00 in cash.

According to the project's website, "Geany is a text editor using the GTK+ toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment (IDE). It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. Another goal was to be as independent as possible from a special desktop environment like KDE or GNOME - Geany only requires the GTK+ runtime libraries. Some basic features of Geany: syntax highlighting; code folding; symbol name auto-completion; construct completion/snippets; auto-closing of XML and HTML tags; call tips; many supported file types including C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, Pascal; symbol lists; code navigation; build system to compile and execute code; simple project management; plugin interface." For more information please read the project's about page and check out the FAQs.

Launched in 2004, this monthly donations programme is a DistroWatch initiative to support free and open-source software projects and operating systems with cash contributions. Readers are welcome to nominate their favourite project for future donations. Those readers who wish to contribute towards these donations, please use our advertising page to make a payment (PayPal and credit cards are accepted). Here is the list of the projects that have received a DistroWatch donation since the launch of the programme (figures in US dollars):